


Fade

by DrGaybelGideon



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Frederick didn't make it, Yakimono AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-28
Updated: 2016-08-28
Packaged: 2018-08-11 11:10:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7889191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DrGaybelGideon/pseuds/DrGaybelGideon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Frederick doesn't make it. Doesn't appreciate the company much either.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fade

Frederick Chilton’s journey to the afterlife can only be described as traumatic: so traumatic that he doesn’t quite make it there.  
He lingers, cold and confused in his own house for a few weeks, trying to pass it off as some horrible coma-fever dream until the hundred and nineteenth time his fingers phase through the microwave.  
He’s oddly grateful he can’t use a mirror.  
  
Gratitude is not the feeling that fills him the second time Abel Gideon enters his house. It’s terror, resentment. Envy that the man’s smiling, face too-perfectly intact and limbs restored to their rightful place.  
“They really did a number on your face, Doctor Chilton. Not that I blame them, but that looks sore.” The purr that comes out of the man’s mouth is unfamilliar and hollow, eyes just as dead. Abel’s all front, but at least he manages to keep a front, a feat Frederick resents him for.  
“Ge-” He can still talk. Cracked and hollow, like forcing air through chords that have lain still for a few days, but he can speak, something he doesn’t realise would send a flood of relief through veins he doesn’t have until he manages it. “Fuck… you.”  
Abel laughs at that, loud and pleased and dead in the eerie silence of his home with a look of more realistic joy on his face.  
“Oh Frederick, death hasn’t changed you one bit. Limited your access to sodium amnytal, though, perhaps we can be friends now.” That part’s a threat, a shark’s smile with sharp teeth he can’t look at for too long as Abel grins, half-hatred into his face. “Remember how your lips felt, Frederick, and they’ll grow back. Mind to get matter”  
   
It’s a lie. A terrible lie.  
Abel’s right.  
  
He can’t find the man for weeks. Haunts Will Graham’s old home- the man’s moved. Haunts Jack Crawford. Can’t bring himself to haunt the man who killed him, which gives him his first clue ads to where Abel would be.  
He’s staring through the glass into Hannibal’s cell, unreadable expression on his face as he massages lifeless elbows. He’s managed to grow the goatee back that he didn’t have when he died, and Frederick remembers his scalp is probably still bald and burned. Imagines hair thick and strong between his fingers and coughs.  
The man doesn’t startle. Never did in life: he tended not to smile much in life either.  
Something feels wrong.  
  
“Frederick. You look positively peaky for a man who resembled salami a week ago.” Abel’s smilng a little too intently at him, a gleam resembling mania in the grey hollows of his irises. He doesn’t move, though, so Frederick nervously approaches. Stands next to the man and stares at Hannibal reading calmly in his cell, winces slightly at the hateful energy Abel’s giving off like an electric fence.  
“We’re all energy.” The man’s unnervingly read his mind, shrugs tension out of his shouders and turns. “It’s why we can build. Build faces, grow back limbs. It’s a fun, if useless waste of the stuff. Which is why-” Abel closes hands around his wrists and holds, a restraint Frederick can’t quite back away from, then gasps. His fingers crack slowly before his eyes, red seeping through again as his skin  seems to wilt. “-I’m borrowing yours.”  
Abel’s killing him. Killing him a second time, sucking the life out of him like blood with Carruthers, the same detached medical concern as when he opened him last time too familliar on the man’s face as Frederick begins to kick, struggle, scream because not this, not this  
“I’ll kill him for you, Frederick. You never had- whoops- the guts for it. A tragic accident as a man’s book opens his throat, he shouldn’t have been allowed sharp pages-” Abel’s face visibly contorts with anger, an unexpectedly human show of weakness that affects his now trembling hands. Frederick shoves, throws whatever’s left of his form at the man, who staggers backwards, hits Hannibal’s window with his back.  
  
It doesn’t work.  
Hannibal continues reading. If there was a thump of glass, he didn’t hear it, something that dawns, furious and raw on Abel’s face. Frederick runs, glides through the walls of his old place of work and reforms, shakes, has a moment of what feels like crying at his fourth near-death experience.  
  
Can’t resist going back next week. Abel’s mastered something, concentrates limbless and dead from the floor as he forces the ceiling to bleed. He’ll stay like this forever, Frederick realises, hate-filled and vengeful until the man in front of them dies.  
He’d love to say he’s bigger than Abel, the same way he lied to himself he was bigger than the man in life. That he’s ready to move on, solve whatever unresolved thing he’s apparently not done yet and be at peace.  
But he can’t, and the white that sometimes blurs his edges frightens him more than he could ever have imagined feeling in life.  
“Don’t ever touch me again, Gideon.” The man’s surprised to see him apparently. Loses concentration and the ceiling returns to normal, but bites back a growl to smile at him.  
“Offering to shake on it won’t work, then?”  
Sarcasm. Sarcasm and a familiar, bordering on deranged eye gleam, the only familiar things Frederick knows in this strange watercolour hell.  
“No.”  
They manage a wet page after an hour of Frederick persuading him that blood- though gory- is probably not the easiest thing to produce, startling the man in an unexpected fit of triumph, little ripples from the other side of the pond.  
They’ll try blood the next time he wakes, they agree. Or at least relieve him of his toilet roll.


End file.
